Dealing with malicious traffic on the web is pretty much par for the course for anyone running publicly accessible servers, so here we'll go through some quick and simple tools and methods to secure your server(s) from various DDoS or DoS style attacks and other hostile traffic.

I was trying to transcode the AC3 5.1 (6ch) audio in some MKV videos to 2ch stereo AAC, using avconv command line, and discovered that it’s native support for AAC isn’t great. An alternative is to use the Fraunhofer libfdk_aac encoder, but it isn’t available in standard system packages of libav or ffmpeg, due to licensing quirks. But you can build your own avconv from source with libfdk_aac support, and here’s a quick howto, from the terminal.

The current stable release of Glade on Ubuntu 14.04 and up is 3.18.0 and doesn’t include many of the newer widgets and layouts available in GTK+ 3, so let's build the newest stable release, 3.19.0, which does have the new stuff.